Steven noted that even in the regular Linux world, when customers are managing more than 50 systems, that's when they need automation systems to help with deployment, configuration and patching. Red Hat Satellite is the company's core tool for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) management today. The plan is to have OpenStack fit into the same model.

"So with Satellite you can configure OpenStack nodes whether they are Nova nodes or Swift nodes," Stevens said. "So the provisioning system that does RHEL will now do the complete system for OpenStack as well."

In Stevens view, OpenStack is not necessarily about being a net new technology but rather is an orchestration layer for compute. He noted that the compute stack is just RHEL together with the KVM hypervisor and an existing set of applications.

Red Hat also plans on bringing other components of its cloud strategy together with OpenStack. Among them is the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology as well as the CloudForms for cloud portability.